The Tallinn Manual on International Law Applicable to Cyber Warfare officially launches in London today. The Manual is the fruit of the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) headquartered in Tallinn, Estonia. Developed by a group of experts from Academic and Military backgrounds, the Manual is the end-result of 4 years work to produce an independent manual on the law governing cyber warfare. The Manual is about 215 pages long and offers insight into such issues as sovereignty, state responsibility, the use of force, the applicability of the law of armed conflict and the conduct of hostilities among others.

After introducing Yolo, the first smartphone with Intel Inside in Africa, at a low price of KES 10,999 (USD 124.55) in late January 2013, Safaricom announced that it “is soon going to stop selling the cheap feature phones in all [its] retail outlets” and we “will now see the feature phones replaced by the cheap smartphones that are now readily available in the country.”

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There was a time that WiFi was the scrappy junior cousin of cellular mobile data services. Now most mobile carriers have begun to reassess WiFi as an effective complementary wireless infrastructure for offloading flood-level amounts of data traffic from smartphones, tablets and dongles from their cellular networks.

With the launch of Samsung's new flagship next week, the Galaxy S4, I thought it time to put down some thoughts regarding what we might expect, what might it bring that we don't expect, and what impact both this device and Samsung overall might have on the market in 2013.  I think it goes without saying that Samsung will be pushing the boat out with this one.  It has built a leading position in smartphones and it has seen what has happened to its rivals who don't live up to the hype and expectation with each launch.

China’s technology ministry has published a whitepaper that criticises Android’s perceived dominance in the local smartphone market. I’d say it is thus far the strongest reminder that mobile computing in China is unlikely to follow the same path as the other major markets. It is what I have earlier identified [client access only] as one of the remaining main opportunities for the new wave of OSes that are pushing forward with the “more open than Android” proposition: namely including Firefox OS, Sailfish, Tizen, and Ubuntu. The whitepaper’s rhetoric doesn’t constitute a shove or even a push, but more of a nudge. But you know, before a push comes usually a nudge. So this space is certainly worth following in the future, for it may surprise you.

Symantec and Giesecke & Devrient (G&D) signed an agreement today to collaborate on developing protected security applications for smartphones and tablets. The partnership is significant because the collaboration will address a major obstacle in mobile security which has been holding back the reliance on smart devices for critical applications. The cooperation aims to leverage the Trusted Execution Environment (TEE), a hardware technology which aims attest the authenticity of a platform and the operating system (OS) in order to ensure that an authentic OS starts up in a trusted environment. TEE consequently allows the trusted OS to deploy addition security capabilities. G&D offers the Trusted Service Manager (TSM) and the underlying TEE to protect cryptographic keys and credentials. Symantec will use the TSM to re-enforce security in its Symantec Validation and ID Protection Service (VIP) two-factor authentication.

BAE Systems and Vodafone announced this week a five-year partnership to provide businesses with a range of advanced communications and security products. The collaboration will be initially focused on smartphones and tablet, with a first product announced for spring 2013: the Vodafone Mobile Threat Manager, a “cloud-based mobile security solution”. The solution looks to be a network-based one, scanning traffic on the carrier’s network for malware and other suspicious data. The cloud platform intimates that the mobile client will likely be light and able to run on a variety of different brands, ideally using minimal power and with real-time updates. More details will undoubtedly emerge closer to launch. The Threat Manager will be provided to Vodafone’s 1,500 enterprise consumers, as well as to BAE System’s 35,000 UK employees – a well-populated testing ground for the product launch.